To be persnickety, the ship wasn't a battleship, but the guided missile cruiser USS Yorktown.

For those wanting more details, go to The Risks Digest, search for "Yorktown", and take a gander at, among others, these links:

• USS Yorktown dead in water after divide by zero
• Revisiting the USS Yorktown dead in the water (PGN, RISKS-19.88 ff.)

Always good to remind me to keep my feelings of adequacy in check.

A corporation that knowingly fails to employ proper engineering tactics could end up with it's entire staff, from the CEO down to the poor schmuck who coded the thing, up on a huge string of both civil and criminal charges. It's simply not acceptable to knowingly let civillians die. That's not something corporations are allowed to do.

It's the right of the military to get their own soldiers killed however they see fit: as decoys, as cannon fodder, to distract or confuse the enemy, or in a whole host of other ways. It's not great for morale, but it's certainly something a military is allowed to do.

In the case you cite, the military decided that the risk to it's soldiers was acceptable. That same risk would not be acceptable in a civilian context; but the military is free to sell the lives of it's soldiers as richly or as cheaply as it chooses.

A corporation that knowingly fails to employ proper engineering tactics could end up with it's entire staff, from the CEO down to the poor schmuck who coded the thing, up on a huge string of both civil and criminal charges. It's simply not acceptable to knowingly let civillians die. That's not something corporations are allowed to do.

Thats bullshit. Everyday, designs are made, in which the designers "KNOW" that so many people will die due to it. It's called cost-benefit analysis, and "externalizing corporate costs". Some examples:

"highway design" where it is decided that saving 30,000 lives is not worth the price of concrete lane barriers.

"chemical industry" where it is known that x number of random cancers will be caused by the widespread use of the new whizbang product.

"auto industry" where it is known that in reality, the streets are being flooded with carcinogenic compunds from tailpipes, resulting in untold cases of disease and death.

In all these cases, a price is put on human life by the corporations, and the government agency that oversees it.

Even in "high-profile areas" like airplane crashes, they limit liability and let the designers get away with (murder) negligent man-slaughter , in order to maintain profits. The most obvious example I recall, is the case of the faulty insulation in the cockpits, which caused that plane to go down off Nova Scotia a few years ago. Once the fault was determined, they DID NOT order the planes grounded, nor repairs made. They decided to risk the lives of the passengers, until the planes went out of service due to age. (Another example is the "nitrogen-fueltank-flushing" which would prevent Flight800 type disasters. They decided it isn't worth the price, yet they know it will happen again.)

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I'm not really a human, but I play one on earth. Cogito ergo sum a bum

"Murder" is a strong and, I think, inappropriate word.

You are, of course, correct in the statement that a cost is applied to human life. Ford did this in the case of the Pinto fuel tank; the airlines do this whenever a safety related grounding is proposed, the EPA and OSHA (US government agency which is supposed to, but largely doesn't, enforce workplace safety regulations) do this for every proposed rule.

Safety costs serious money, and some of the events being regulated (or not regulated) for are extremely rare. No one is terribly worried about the next Chicxulub, because its likelihood in the next few centuries is quite low and its prevention would cost billions. People get crazy about SARS or West Nile, but continue to smoke. Go figure.

emc

At that time [1909] the chief engineer was almost always the chief test pilot as well. That had the fortunate result of eliminating poor engineering early in aviation.

—Igor Sikorsky, reported in AOPA Pilot magazine February 2003.